On April 25, 1920, the Allied Supreme Council (established in 1917, in Versailles) allocated the mandate over Palestine to Great Britain. The Mandate for Palestine was a League of Nations mandate for British administration of the territories of Palestine and Trans-Jordan, both of which had been conceded by the Ottoman Empire following the end of World War I in 1918.

The mandate expressly provided for a Jewish homeland in Palestine by adopting the Balfour declaration to its letter and spirit. The mandatory power was to be responsible for the development of self-governing institutions. It was also provided that a Jewish agency would be coopted by the mandatory power in establishing a Jewish national home.

The Zionist organisation was recognised as such agency. Article 6 of the mandate made it binding for the mandatory power to facilitate Jewish immigration and land settlement “while ensuring that the rights and position of other sections of the population are not prejudiced”.

With the assignment of the mandate at San Remo in 1920, Sir Herbert Samuel, member of a prominent British-Jewish family was appointed the first high commissioner of Palestine. The Jewish population of Palestine in 1919-20 was around 55,000 souls. With the new administration under Herbert Samuel, the floodgates of immigration were thrown open. This resulted in Arab protests.

In 1921 anti-Jewish disturbances broke out. Consequently, Winston Churchill, colonial secretary at that time, wrote the ‘Churchill memorandum’ according to which the government of Palestine issued yearly immigration quotas. That too failed to placate the concerns of the Arabs. Arab protests notwithstanding, Jewish immigration continued steadily, and Arab opposition became more and more intense.

The Arabs demanded self-determination and insisted from 1920s upon the establishment of a democratic, parliamentary form of government. They also put forward two more demands rather vociferously: “to stop Jewish immigration and to forbid land sales by Arabs to Jews”. But these protests and demands fell on deaf ears. Thus, the resentment among the Arabs against the mandatory power as well as Jewish settlers had a valid reason.

Arabs are often accused of triggering the 1929 riots, (Wailing Wall incidents) in which they allegedly destroyed Jewish properties. Buraq Uprising or the Events of 1929, was a series of demonstrations and riots in late August 1929 in which a longstanding dispute between Muslims and Jews over access to the Western Wall in Jerusalem escalated into violence. But these riots and the reaction of the Arabs came up after their protests were not heeded.

Mandatory power and Jewish immigrants acted hand in glove to the detriment of the Arabs. Anti-Jewish riots occurred again in 1933. Nazi rise in Germany with its anti-Jewish policy drove scores of Jews out of Germany and central European countries. Many of them headed for Palestine.

Astoundingly, only in 1935, 60,000 new arrivals were recorded in Palestine. This renewed Arab unrest. Matters came to a head in 1937 when Arab consternation increased in its intensity, which Western scholars referred to as the Arab rebellion. It lasted until 1939.

When the prospects for reconciliation between the Jews and Arabs didn’t seem likely, in 1937 a Royal Commission came forward with a proposal of partition. Palestine was to be divided into an Arab state, a Jewish state, and a neutral enclave around Jerusalem and Bethlehem that would remain under British administration.

In 1938, the British government dispatched to Palestine a technical partition commission, which had been entrusted with the task of preparing a blueprint for partition on the basis of the Royal Commission’s recommendations. But the report of the partition commission met with disapproval by the British government itself.

Then Britain convened the London conference in February and March in which it invited representatives of Iraq, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Yemen and Trans-Jordan. But that move did not yield any desirable result because the government of Palestine had arrested and deported to the Seychelles (which is an archipelagic island country in the Indian Ocean at the eastern edge of the Somali Sea) five leading members of the Arab Higher Committee. It also deprived the mufti, Amin el-Husseini of his office as president of the Supreme Muslim Council, and issued his arrest warrants. This vitiated the atmosphere, rendering bleak the chances of any settlement.

The harsh treatment meted out to the mufti triggered a guerrilla campaign led by Rahim Haj Ibrahim and Aref Abdul Razzik. In the charged situation, the Palestinian problem acquired complexity with no possibility of a quick resolution. A White Paper was issued by the British government, proposing the creation within 10 years of an independent Palestinian state to be linked with Britain by a special treaty. It also proposed to put a limit on Jewish immigration, which caused a great deal of resentment among the Zionists. That controversy remained on the boil when the World War II started in September 1939 and shifted the British focus to its own security.

An artificial truce took effect largely because of the presence of numerous allied army divisions that seemed serious about ensuring peace and calm in the region.

The Zionists expressed through Dr Chaim Weizmann their readiness to stand by the allied forces. A resolve was also shown to create independent Jewish military units as part of the allied armies. Great Britain took care, however, to encourage both Jews and the Arabs to be part of a Palestine Pioneer Corps. But Arbs were not forthcoming. Jews took advantage of the opportunity and formed a Jewish brigade that took part in the final stages of the allied campaign in Italy.

The Palestinian mufti quite conversely visited at the beginning of the war and opted to side with the Germans against British imperialism. That obviously had a scuttling effect on the Palestinian-Arab cause.

Additionally, from 1942, the American Zionists started exerting pressure for a pro-Zionist solution of the Palestinian problem. On May 11, 1942, the American Zionist Organisation met in New York and adopted the Biltmore Programme, presented by David Ben Gurion, head of the Jewish Agency’s executive committee. The Biltmore programme called for the establishment of a Jewish state, embracing the whole of Palestine, the creation of a Jewish army and unlimited immigration of Jews into Palestine, which would be monitored and regulated by the Jewish agency and not by the British.

(To be continued)

The writer is a professional historian and author.

He can be reached at tk393@cam.ac.uk